Linux Format Blog

I've just spent the last hour watching the press conference in which Microsoft and Novell have committed to be really nice to each other and work together to crush Red Hat once and for all. Or, you know, um, make things easy for customers who want to run Linux and Windows.
I couldn't see whether Steve Ballmer had his fingers crossed. He certainly scowled a bit and got excited when talking about "Windows, Windows, Windows." He just comes across as so angry. You could easily see him chucking chairs at minions who accidentally wore a t-shirt with a penguin on it.

We're running a feature on the best games Linux has to offer, and we'd like to print a box on readers' favourites. Soooo... what we're looking for is some intrepid readers to email me (paul.hudson@futurenet.co.uk) with the name of their favourite game and some words (maximum 15-20) explaining why. The funniest/most original/innovative/random entries will get printed. If it's a game that's commercial or not easily found, please attach a screenshot or - preferably - send me a link to a screenshot we can use.

I've finally finished converting my free, online PHP book into a wiki: it's available at http://www.hudzilla.org/phpwiki. After consultation with Nick and Graham, I've chosen to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence with the exception that people who contribute work grant me the right to relicense the entire book (including their work) under the GPL v2 if and when I choose.

I'm proud to announce that I've just uploaded the first Brain Party code to SourceForge through Subversion. It's all licenced under the GPL, so please do go ahead and root through the 15,000 or so lines of C# that have just gone up. If you haven't been following this blog, Brain Party is an idea Graham came up with a few months ago - it's a 2D puzzle game made up of minigames, where players need to solve problems to work their way through each level.

Many moons ago, on this very blog, Rebecca mentioned that she didn't mind John Virgo's snooker "commentary." Inexplicably, she wasn't bothered by his tedious musings or overwhelming banality, and managed to find some charm in his northern northernishness. This was around the time when snooker was off the air for a few months - there was no Virgo spewing out of our TV speakers, and I started to wonder... maybe it's just me?

Michael Saunders: a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent; the schoolboy who leads an exciting double-life. Fabulous secret powers were revealed to him the day a spotty man brought him to life with his cosmic dust, held aloft a magic sword and said: "HE'S THE STRONGEST, HE'S THE QUICKEST, HE'S THE BEST!"

Of course, when I say "Edgy" is rubbish, I mean the name - hence the quotes - the distro itself is rather lovely, especially with the subtle shift from brown to orange in the Human theme. Anyway, today has provided me with a new nemesis, and that is luggage with wheels. It's not the concept or, indeed, the implementation that makes me want to stick pins in my eyes, but the apparent disregard for the rest of the world by their owners. If they pushed them, then they might have some inkling of where the damned things are.

When I'm King, I shall degree that this fetid city no longer functions as the nation's capital. For one thing, there are too many people here, also it's too big and people don't offer to help if you're carrying a heavy bag. Moreover, if you offer to help someone with a heavy bag, they assume you're trying to rob them. Anyway, back to more interesting things.

...is approaching: MikeOS is now a SourceForge project! Currently there's not much on the homepage, but I'm going to jazz that up soon (I even have a logo now). Still, you can download the 0.24 release, if your PC can handle the raw power. And has at least 64K of RAM.